Perturbation theory for bending potentials

An efficient perturbative method is developed to facilitate the treatment of the anharmonicity of bending degrees of freedom. The Rosen-Morse and sec² potentials are transformed so that perturbation theory may be applied easily. For a model problem it is found that the difference between the energy levels obtained from perturbation theory and the exact energy levels is less than 0·1 cm^-1 for the first six energy levels.